What comes to mind when you hear the words ‘Napa Valley’?

Surely lots of things–for us, it’s words like “home”, “family” and of course “wine”, “winery”, etc. With the rise of social networking sites, tools like Twitter, blogs, internet forums and the like, there has been an increasing debate about who truly owns a brand.

Traditionally, companies have spent thousands (some even millions) of dollars to ‘build a brand’ and maintain it over time. Today, when anyone and everyone can discuss products and services in a very public manner online, the concept of ‘owning’ a brand has become somewhat passe. In essence, what has happened is that any given company’s consumers, customers, partners, employees and even competitors are all part of the broader group that now defines what a brand is or what it stands for.

To illustrate the point, we used one of our favorite online monitoring tools to see which fifty terms were most closely associated with the phrase “Napa Valley” across the online landscape at present. Here’s the result:

To explain the graphic above, the larger the word, the more often it appeared with the phrase “napa valley” across mainstream media articles, blog posts, Twitter entries, YouTube videos, Flickr photos, etc. The cloud should provide a good representation of what the term is truly all about–it is, in essence, the collective definition of the Napa Valley “brand”.

Overall, the graphic encapsulates just about what we’d expect–with words like “cabernet”, “red”, “vineyards”, “wine”, “winery”, etc. all being relatively prominent.

We’ve also pulled similar clouds for some of our favorite local businesses and we’ll be publishing those in the near future.

In the meantime, does anything here surprise you? What’s your take on who ‘owns’ a brand these days?